In the 1990s, the Chinese economy was up to transformation and upgrading, which was required by the country’s ambitions to become a strong manufacturing state. However, such ambitions were held back by a lack of advanced technical personnel. Statistics show that advanced technical workers and the personnel above them only took up 4% of China’s labor force by the end of the 1990s. As such, the Chinese government decided in 1998 to invest and develop higher vocational education. Since then, it has been observed that a large number of higher vocational education institutions have been founded, and mandated to train advanced technical workers who are much needed due to the economical and industrial growth in the country. More recently when Chinese higher education embarks on a journey to move from a mass system toward a universal one, the importance of higher vocational education is raised to a strategic level, for the sake of improving relevance of the system.
Along with expansion of higher vocational education institutions and programs, studies of Chinese higher vocational education become proliferative, featuring a large quantity of research outcomes in the forms of scholarly books, journal articles, and students’ theses. They rigorously explore various aspects of higher vocational education, including theories underpinning higher vocational education, functioning and positioning of the sector, sectoral structure and institutional fabrics, curriculum and pedagogy, faculty development, and quality assurance of higher vocational education in China. Behind these studies is a growing group of researchers and scholars specializing in issues and problems with Chinese higher vocational education. Their works provide theoretical support and professional guide to development in the sector.
SOME OF THE SELECTED PAPERS DEPICT A MATURE ERA FOR CHINA’S HIGHER VOCATIONAL EDUCATION SECTOR
Against this backdrop, we put together a special issue of Chinese Education and Society that focuses on higher vocational education in China. Among the six articles included in this special issue, the first paper, “An Empirical Analysis of the Development of China’s Higher Vocational Education,” authored by Wang Minglun, and originally published in 2007 in Vocational and Technical Education (vol. 28, issue 25, in Chinese), depicts an overall picture of the sector of higher vocational education in China over a period of some 20 years, with rich empirical data. On that basis, Wang argues that China’s higher vocational education faces problems such as excessively fast development, inadequate substance (curricular and pedagogical, etc.) elevation and upgrade, severely insufficient investment, and serious regional disparities. As such, the government must create a policy environment facilitating balanced development of higher vocational education, establish impartial and fair financial policy toward this sector, push for balanced development of higher vocational education in all regions, and enhance its fundamental capabilities that in turn reinforce quality of higher vocational education.
This paper is followed by “The Levels and Training Strategies of Chinese Higher Vocational Education,” authored by Zhu Shiming and Mao Ya’nan, and published in 2012 in Vocational and Technical Education (vol. 33, Issue 13, in Chinese). They argue that Chinese higher vocational education sector has formed a rather complete educational sphere covering programs at all degree levels, and thus requires distinctive strategies for differentiating those different programs. While the associate’s degree programs mostly train students to be highly technical workers for enterprises, the bachelor’s degree programs can be divided into two streams: applied bachelor’s programs stress the practical segment, and teacher-training bachelor’s programs equip students with the “dual-qualified” capacities. The master’s programs include all kinds of professional master’s degrees, the master’s degree education for in-service secondary vocational school teachers, and the full-time professional master’s program of vocational and technical education studies. The doctoral programs include all sorts of professional doctoral degrees and the specific professional doctoral program in vocational and technical education. Those programs should all come up with their clear educational objectives, apply flexible teaching/pedagogical models, and inspire the emergence of innovative results. Among other things, these two papers provide an overarching narrative with respect to the trajectory, breadth, and depth of growth of higher vocational education in China, as well as some major challenges and issues.
SOME OTHER PAPERS STRESS INSTITUTION-INDUSTRY COOPERATION AS THE PATHWAYS TO FURTHER DEVELOPMENT
The next two papers touch on an important aspect of higher vocational education sector, its relations with industry, and explore the effective pathways or models. The paper titled “The Path to Deepening School-Enterprise Cooperation in Higher Vocational Education,” authored by Jin Hui and published in 2010 in Educational Research (No. 363, in Chinese), asserts that the pathway of institution-enterprise cooperation is a necessity for developing higher vocational education, and it must be continually widened over the time. To make progress with respect to institution-enterprise cooperation, the mutual benefits are supposed to be the precondition, the cultural fit between organizational entities can solidify the foundation for such pathways, and the joint effort of building learning-oriented organizations will make the vehicle carrying out institution-enterprise cooperation.
Tackling the same topic of cooperation between higher vocational education institutions and industry, Tang Zhibin and Shi Weiping hold in their paper “On the Logic and Process of Collaborative Innovation in Higher Vocational Education and Industrial Development” (originally published in 2015 in Education and Economy, No. 4, in Chinese) that, under the circumstance of the third industrial revolution, the need for cultivating skilled innovative talents and transforming the model for technical innovation in enterprise requires formulating a new mechanism of coordinated innovation between higher vocational education sector and industry. They further argue that the actions of coordinated innovation between higher vocational education and the industry unfold following the logic of entities’ heterogeneity of innovative capabilities, which in turn calls for identifying common visions for diverse industrial and educational entities, common interest basis for institution-enterprise microentities, and ordered parameters of the framework of coordinated innovation. As such, a long-lasting mechanism for coordination of diverse institution-enterprise entities; integration of their values, interests, and resources; and interactive implementation need to be set up.
NEW RESEARCH EFFORT AND ISSUES
The last two papers deal with two interesting topics respectively. In the paper titled “Balanced Development for Provincial-Level Coordination and Higher Vocational Education” (published in 2016 in Peking University Education Review, Vol 14, Issue 3), Yang Po and Liu Yunbo point out that, amid the rapid development of higher vocational education in China, wide gaps emerge—between provinces, between regions within provinces, and between institutions within provinces—in terms of growing scale and resource drawing. Balanced regional development and coordinated planning at the provincial level have become policy focal points, yet there is a lack of discussion on the relationship between those domains in academic literature. Based on 2009 data concerning higher vocational institutions in China, this empirical study depicts the tensions between higher vocational education governance models in the provinces and balanced institutional development within the provinces, and sheds light on such findings: institutional affiliation correlates with ability to draw resources, and as such the financial appropriation for public institutions is significantly higher than for private institutions, while private institutions charge significantly higher tuition than do public institutions. Institutional affiliation correlates with outcome as well, and public institutions enjoy a higher registration rate of new entrants and a larger number of cooperative enterprises; there is a significant positive correlation between the ratio of prefecture- and city-level higher vocational education institutions and the average number of cooperative enterprises within the province, and a significant positive correlation between the ratio of private higher vocational education institutions and the average tuition standard within the province. Based on those findings, Yang and Liu suggest that, for the sake of achieving the dual objectives of “balance” and “development,” provincial-level governments must adjust their operative and financial mechanisms for higher vocational education, and appropriately decentralize the authorities in order to have a diverse and a flexible model for steering higher vocational education development.
Last, but not least, in “An Analysis Based on CiteSpace III Knowledge Maps of Chinese Vocational Education Research,” originally published in Chinese Vocational and Technical Education (No. 27 in 2016, in Chinese), Yan Guangfen and Zhang Dongke present a bibliometric study with respect to the research literature relating to Chinese vocational education, using the knowledge mapping software CiteSpace III with quantitative data concerning vocational education and retrieved from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index database. They shed light on such characteristics embedded in the literature: distribution of papers across time and journals, shared research interest between institutions, core research institutions and their impact, scope of shared citations across journals, highly cited works and their features, a knowledge map constructed with co-keywords, and hot research topics and their distribution.
A final note about the naming of all the authors. Chinese authors staying in mainland China remain named in the Chinese order, with their surnames coming before given names (e.g., Yan Guangfen and Zhu Shiming). Chinese authors residing in the West have their names shown in the English order, that is, given names followed by family names (e.g., Qiang Zha).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Qiang Zha
Qiang Zha is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, York University, Canada, and an adjunct professor at the School of Education, Tianjin University, China.
Yan Guangfen
Yan Guangfen is the dean and a professor at the School of Education, Tianjin University, China.
Zhu Shiming
Zhu Shiming is a professor at the School of Education, Tianjin University, China.